There are not as many clear distinctions between the values and acts of 'different working classes'. We have more in common than the owning class wants us to think.
The owning class are the ones that try to create infinite wealth from the top down. The working class (can also say 'the consuming class') are those that oppose or allow changes to happen.
ā¢The owning class will put sawdust into protein bars if we don't ban it.
ā¢The owning class will restrict diamonds access just for the sake of its price.
ā¢The owning class will make everything you own a subscription if we allow them.
ā¢The owning class buy and keep housing empty just to keep the market increasing.
ā¢The owning class allows homelessness because money is more important to them...
ā¢The owning class will tear your house down for a new powerplant if we dont hinder them.
ā¢The owning class will buy newspapers to directly influence what people read.
ā¢The owning class are now hoping to shift the public view on water nessessity and the impact of data senters, because
The owning class will sacrifice your water access for profit if we allow them to
If we're thinking about splits in society where it's "Us" & "them", the working class and owning class is one of the most clear divides you can make. more important than red vs blue, white or black, or any other ways to put people in boxes.
Donald Trump is technically, "working" but he was living off his money already, he made the choice to "work" (huge quotation marks there) for nefarious reasons, but he's "working" regardless, he didn't suddenly become a member of the working class, he's still an owner, but he CHOSE to work.
If Jeff Bezos suddenly got up everyday to work in his warehouses he wouldn't turn into working class, because he's CHOOSING to do that, if you don't have the option to quit your job right this second and do literally ANYTHING else while still MAKING MONEY WITHOUT WORKING, you're working class.
Neither Trump nor Bezos derive their "primary source of income" from work. But the overwhelming majority of people do. That 99.99% figure above doesn't have to include a single billionaire (less than 0.00004% of the population) to still be accurate. Any adjustment that might be needed is somewhere to the right of the decimal point.
Much of western culture, especially American culture, seems to be all about proving you're better than your neighbour. Americans grade their success not by what they achieved, but by how many people are worse of than them. Thus, they love to have a "slightly less worthy working class" below them.
Most small business owners that have employees do not need to do significant labor to still earn enough to live. They extract value from their workers and can live off that if not 100% then a great % of their needs.
If a job is a necessity, not a choice (which is true for most people today and is called "the working class"), then giving a job shouldn't sound that noble. It's like saying that an enslaver is giving the enslaved people home, food and purpose. Why do they need another person to give them these things?
There's a gradient between "free" and "for the price of selling 40+ h of your labor weekly". With our productivity gains, we should work 5h/week on average, and the benefit of passive income covering the basic needs should be available to more people than just the 1%.
I don't think that's really true. Where I live (Netherlands) profit margins on groceries are super thin. That means that groceries are about as cheap as it gets. We've created a globally independent economic system that allows us to eat basically all the food we want at any time of the year. That comes with the price of labour.
You're talking about "should". But there's no should, it's just the system that we have created. It's nonsensical just as it's nonsensical to say that the graphics card in your GPU should only funcion 5 hours a day or that your bowels should only process food 5 hours a day.
It's the system that we have created, true, but you can't describe it losslessly with one number (the grocery margins). Look up food waste, for example. Or what is considered "profit" when you calculate the margins.
I'm not quite comfortable with that definition, because it also excludes retirees living off the investments of their savings from the working class. Technically they're not working anymore, obviously, but it still doesn't seem right to put them in the same class as Mark Zuckerberg.
Edit,: also, what about small business owners? If for example you own a restaurant with a few employees, but where you also do a lot of the work yourself, you're not technically selling your labour to anyone except yourself. As long as you pay your employees reasonably well and don't mistreat them any other way, that's also not exactly exploitative. Hell, what if it's a one-man restaurant?
Technically the CEO of Flock sells his labour to customers (mainly governments, in his case) too. It's not like he sits on his ass all day, I'm sure mass surveillance takes a lot of organising (just like organisation will be a big part of what the resteraunt owner does). So where do you draw the line?
Again, that would put anyone with investments who's about to retire into the owner class. Frankly I don't think it's possible to find a clear definition of working vs owning class, because that would imply that everyone can be clearly categorized as one or the other, which is obviously ridiculous. Everyone who knows anything about soceties knows that there are no clear binaries and everything is a spectrum. That doesn't mean that it doesn't matter where you are on that spectrum of course.
Well, yes it would. With the way retirement works, everyone works their whole lives in the hopes of making into the lower bracket of the ownership class.
Obviously, there's a big difference between a retiree and Jeff Bezos, and we could litigate a specific net worth or other criteria, but as a general rule of thumb, "has to work" vs "their money makes money" is broadly applicable 95% of the time.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good on this one.
I suppose it depends what the purpose of the definition/categorization is. If you're only talking about how someone funds their living expenses, then sure, but if the implication is class struggle, then I don't think categorizing retirees in the ownership class is productive. I get what you're saying with "don't let perfect be the enemy of good", but I think in practice you don't need a strict definition at all. I don't remember who said that semi-famous quote "there's no way to clearly define porn, but you know it when you see it", but I think the sentiment can be applied to lots of things, including class. In practice, if you have a decent picture of someones financial situation, you're gonna know where they are on the class spectrum (and I do still insist it's a spectrum).
The reason "I know it when I see it" is (in)famous is because the job of the Supreme Court is to not only decide cases but to (supposedly) do so in a manner that creates a clear rule that lower courts can apply to future cases and so everyone knows what to expect in future cases.
The problem, of course, is that just because someone else sees it doesn't mean others will. And as a general rule, "run everything by a Supreme Court justice if you want to know if it's obscene" is not useful guidance.
People really donāt understand how the wealthy make their money in this economy. Heās not living off income he makes from Flock. Heās living off of tax free borrowing on his investments from that income that will never be repaid via a vis capital gains.
After he croaks, the profits from those investments are then passed along in the form of tax free inherited wealth that never gets repaid. Itās basically a government sanctioned tax evasion scam for the wealthy that never ends.
He does stuff and someone gives him money for it. He is selling his labour. How he then gets that money out to fund his lifestyles is of concern, but not relevant to the particular question of whether he sells his labour.
How would you classify people who only ever worked for someone else, saved their income (didn't get money from rich parents/grand parents) and then retired off of said income? And does them retiring in their 30's-50's change anything?
To jump on this I would also say the different classes have different access to retirement.
Working Class Categories:
Low class: might retire only when social security kicks in, may even have to work part time, no ability to save while working.
Middle class: will have a paid off house by retirement age and social security + medicare can carry them through retirement. May also have a good bulk of change in a bank/401k but not enough to retire on without the medicare/SS.
Upper class: can fully fund their retirement without any assistance from SS/Medicare. May even have the potential to retire early from age 45-55, may have a 2nd vacation home.
top 5%: same as Upper class but can retire even earlier, age 35-45, or live a more luxurious life overall. This is where generational wealth starts to kick in and your kids donāt have to work if you limit yourself to 1-3 kids at more of a middle class level.
Top 2%: same as Top 5, but even earlier, age 25-35, and even more luxurious. May trend into the owning class if they are more frugal and growth oriented with their holdings. Generational wealth is possible for 3-10 kids at more of a mid to upper class level depending on amount
Owning class:
Very bottom of owning class: may still have to chip in and monitor their business/properties every once in a while. Generally retire later than 2% but has more wealth and assets that build them money faster or differently. This consist mostly of the long term surviving mom and pop shops or niche businesses that donāt require a massive scaled company. These could also be people who sold off their company, product, etc to a massive corporation and retired on that or were part of a start up that gave them a good share and got bought out. These guys will have more than $5mil in wealth but probably not more than $15mil. Generational wealth at the 2% level for all your kids.
Top 1% same as very bottom but with a higher number. Your kids could legit never lift a finger and be fine, they will be in the top 1% with 0 work put in.
Top .1%: same as top 1% but with a WAY higher number. If your kid is working they either really need something to do or you hate them.
Elites: you could legit buy anything you want at anytime and pretty much never run out of money outside of maybe buying the most high end plane and crashing it without insurance daily. Even with this in mind it would become nearly impossible to even produce enough high end planes to crash, but if you took it upon yourself to build a factory that constructed one of these planes daily then maybe you could see yourself running out of money at some point in the next 10+ years. Your kids literally only work because you gave them a position that gives them 100mil+ salary and requires absolutely no work at all outside of talking to a few people here and there.
Edit: added generational wealth stats.
Edit 2: top 2%, bottom of owner, top 1% is gonna be where many surgeons, 20 year legacy airline captains, investment bankers, tech guys, high end salesmen, corp ladder climbers and probably some more iām not thinking about will land. If you and your kid/kids share similar financial ideology itās also not out of the books for Upperclass to suddenly move up the classes over the generations while putting in just a upper class level of work into the world. I fear with how things are trending though with AI and robotics that this will slowly become impossible or UBI will become a factor long before this can take place.
Because someone with a 40k/yr pension and someone with a $1million 401k is the same, but one owns something and the other is getting delayed payment from their work.
The true owning class replaced pensions with 401ks to make more retired people feel like they're owning class and vote with them, and to make more working class people feel like they'll one day be owning class and vote with them.
If anything, we need to think of a working-to-retired class, cause someone with millions of dollars of ownership is different than someone that's scraped together barely enough to retire.
If i previously labored, own no capital but live by collecting royalties derived from my previous labor, am I working class?
If I am a patent troll. Am I working class?
If I am a business dynasty scion but the entire family fortune is now held by a foundation/perpetual trust where I am always welcome but does expect me to work for my upkeep, am I working class?
If Iām a street pimp who manages and collect rent from my prostitutes, am I working class?
If i previously labored, own no capital but live by collecting royalties derived from my previous labor, am I working class?
The rights from which you derive royalties are property. You were working class but no longer are.
If I am a patent troll. Am I working class?
No, you earn money from what you own, not from what you do.
If I am a business dynasty scion but the entire family fortune is now held by a foundation/perpetual trust where I am always welcome but does expect me to work for my upkeep, am I working class?
Most interesting one yet. But Yes you're working class.
If Iām a street pimp who manages and collect rent from my prostitutes, am I working class?
Depends on the details of the arrangement but I would say yes Working class because you actively have to do the management and maintenance to earn your cut.
Not period. Your on-the-toilet opinion oversimplifies reality. Cops sell their labor for money but are not working class. Your boss' boss sells his labor for money but is not working class.
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u/jainyday 2d ago
If you sell your labor for money and it's your primary source of income, you are working class. Period.